The West’s century-long war against Russia — part four

Fourth and final part of a series of articles in which I argue that the current NATO-Russia confrontation is simply the latest chapter in a century-long Western campaign to weaken and contain Russia

This is the fourth and final part (here are part one, part two and part three) of a series of articles on the West’s century-long war against Russia. In it, I to argue that the current NATO-Russia confrontation is simply the latest chapter in a long Western campaign to weaken, isolate and contain Russia.

In part one, I looked at how this pattern extends back well before the Cold War: at how Western powers repeatedly sought to contain Russia throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, opposed the Bolshevik Revolution through intervention and sabotage, and later supported Germany (and even the Nazi regime in its early stages) as an anti-Soviet bulwark.

In part two, I looked at how the Western “shift” against Hitler and alliance with the Soviet Union was not a moral awakening, but rather a case of strategic realignment, and how Western hostility towards Russia resumed almost immediately after the war’s end. I then turned my attention to the birth of the Cold War, and how the latter was rooted in the American refusal to demilitarise Europe or to de-escalate tensions with Moscow, as a means of keeping Europe locked in a militarised standoff with the Soviet Union to justify a permanent military presence on the continent and exert de facto control over the foreign policies of European countries through NATO.

In the third part, I looked at how, after the end of the Cold War, the US saw the Soviet collapse as a chance to establish a unipolar world — and to solve the “Russia problem” once and for all; at how this led to a strategy of using NATO and the EU to contain, encircle and destabilise Russia through eastward expansion, military interventions, “colour revolutions”, shock-therapy economics and missile-defence deployments; and how these policies ended up radicalising Russia’s stance: instead of collapsing or accepting permanent subordination, Russia regained strength under Putin, reasserted its geopolitical independence and revived aspects of its anti-imperialist diplomatic tradition.

In this fourth and final part, I argue that West’s post-Cold War hostility towards Russia cannot be explained by geopolitics alone: since the eighteenth century, Russia has been viewed by Western powers not only as a strategic rival but as a civilisational threat; after 1991, Russia’s “civilisational autonomy” was seen as the most serious threat, from a cultural-ideological standpoint, to the US’s unipolar project — and for this reason had to be weakened and marginalised. I further contend that this antagonism harks back to the legacy of the Russian Revolution: for almost a century, the Soviet Union blocked the emergence of a unified Western imperial system, constrained Western imperialism, empowered anti-colonial movements and pushed Western elites to adopt more social policies; this produced a long-lasting psychological resentment against Russia among the Western ruling classes, especially in the US. From this perspective, the contemporary confrontation, including the conflict in Ukraine, reflects both strategic calculations and deeper cultural-historical dynamics that continue to shape Western-Russian relations.

The cultural motives behind continued US-Western opposition to Russia even after the end of the Cold War

Thus far, we have examined the West’s century-long confrontation with Russia — and, in particular, the United States’ persistent policy of containing, marginalising and weakening it even after the end of the Cold War — primarily through a geopolitical lens. But is geopolitics alone sufficient to explain the West’s relentless hostility towards Russia?

As noted earlier, since at least the eighteenth century, Western powers have regarded Russia not merely as a strategic rival, but also as a civilisational threat. The grounds for this perception have shifted over time. Until the early twentieth century, Russia was condemned as autocratic, Orthodox, illiberal and reactionary — an outlier within an increasingly liberal and commercial Europe. After 1917, however, the ideological divide deepened dramatically: with the Bolshevik Revolution, Russia came to represent not conservatism, but its opposite — a revolutionary alternative to the Western capitalist and imperial order.

That ideological threat, however, died with the Soviet Union. Indeed, as previously discussed, one might argue that the Cold War was won by the West primarily on cultural-ideological rather than military or economic grounds: Western — and especially American — cultural hegemony proved so seductive that it eroded the legitimacy of the Soviet system from within, among both elites and ordinary citizens alike.

In the aftermath, post-Soviet Russia sought integration — economic, political and cultural — into the Western system, and embarked on liberal-democratic reforms to achieve it. Should we then conclude that Washington’s refusal to integrate Russia stemmed purely from cold geopolitical calculation, as previously outlined? Or was there also a cultural dimension to the West’s post-Cold War antagonism?

To answer this question, one must turn to the cultural dimension of geopolitics — and, more specifically, to that of the US unipolar project. It is crucial to recognise that this project was far more than a political or economic endeavour. It implied that the United States should become the model for the entire world — not only in political and economic terms, but in cultural and civilisational ones as well.

This universalist project was bound to fail for the same reason that similar projects had failed before it: the enduring presence across the world — in countries like China and, of course, Russia itself — of millennia-old civilisations and historical traditions far older, deeper and more rooted than the relatively recent construct of American “civilisation”. Yet one might say that the Anglo-American elites, intoxicated by their victory in the cultural Cold War, succumbed to a fantasy of omnipotence that ultimately seduced them.

That fantasy required pre-empting not only the rise of any geopolitical rival, but also of any alternative model of civilisation. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, only two actors could realistically have embodied such an alternative historical project: the European Union and Russia.

The prospects for Europe’s cultural emancipation from the United States after the Cold War, however, were slim. As we have seen, throughout the Cold War the US had waged not only a cultural and ideological offensive against the Soviet Union, but also against Western Europe itself, gradually drawing it into the fictional sphere of “the West”. This was a political-ideological construction rooted in American (neo)liberal principles, which progressively eclipsed the older European civilisation and its semi-socialist conception of societas. One key objective of this process was to culturally separate Europe from Russia.

Throughout the 1980s, this ideological offensive intensified in the form of the neoliberal counterrevolution, which elevated individualism, consumerism and postmodern relativism to the status of society’s core organising principles. Thus, by the early 1990s, Europe had little left to offer as an alternative to American cultural hegemony. One might say that Europe had been thoroughly colonised by neoliberal ideology, economically and culturally alike — as evidenced by the radically neoliberal architecture of the emerging European Union.

This helps explain why, despite a brief moment of resistance during the Iraq War, Europeans ultimately offered little opposition to the US unipolar project, aligning themselves within NATO, the principal instrument of American hegemony in Europe. Russia, however, was another matter. As Hauke Ritz [see part two] writes:

Although the new Russian elites of the 1990s were seduced by democracy and capitalism, they had nonetheless received a Soviet education — officially atheistic, yet still rooted in a humanistic cultural tradition. For this reason, they were unlikely to embrace a worldview that broke with Europe’s humanistic heritage.

Moreover, Russia was still largely immune from the Anglo-American postmodernist revolution. In this sense, Russian civilisation continued to represent an alternative model of civilisation alongside that of “the West”. As the eastern soul of Europe, Russia’s very existence offered the possibility of a different path for the entire continent, especially given the self-confidence of its elites, nourished by the country’s historical depth and centuries of diplomatic experience. As Ritz puts it, the Russian government occupied “the position of a witness who knew too much” to accept Europe’s cultural transformation without contradiction. If Russia had regained its sovereignty after its temporary loss in the 1990s and resisted the ongoing erosion of European identity, it might well have “contaminated” the rest of Europe, setting in motion a cultural reawakening across the continent.

From this perspective, Russia posed a grave threat to the US unipolar project not only in geopolitical terms, but in cultural and civilisational ones as well. Therefore, its very participation in Western discussions had to be precluded. From Washington’s standpoint, just as during the Cold War, Russia had to be kept out of Europe and isolated as a dialogue partner. Even genuine exchanges between European and Russian diplomats threatened to undermine American influence in Europe.

This was especially true given the radically oligarchic project that US elites sought to entrench in post-Cold War Europe and indeed across the world — what we now call neoliberalism. If during the Cold War the goal had been to prevent socialism from appropriating Europe’s tradition, the new objective was to make any return of the socialist idea — and the movements and parties inspired by it — culturally impossible.

Such a project could only be designed and implemented within a narrow, exclusive circle, closed to equality, open deliberation or compromise at the international level. Incorporating Russia into such a scheme would have been impossible. The open pursuit of power and expansion that characterised the Washington establishment would not have been accepted in Moscow; cooperation would have required compromises, including limits on Western neo-imperialism in the Global South.

It is therefore plausible that US strategists concluded that the cultural-ideological hegemony necessary to impose the unipolar order could only be achieved on the condition that Russian sovereignty be broken. This adds another layer to the geopolitical offensive waged by the West against Russia — first covertly and then increasingly openly — after the epochal rupture of 1989-91.

If so, it would mean that the confrontation between the West and Russia — which has been escalating for more than two decades — has far more in common with the ideological antagonism of the Cold War than is generally acknowledged. Indeed, one might say that the Cold War never truly ended, neither in geopolitical nor in civilisational terms. This, in turn, raises a deeper question: to what extent are current geopolitical events still shaped by the legacy of the Russian Revolution of 1917?